Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Flood Insurance

By Mike Dorf

In the wake of Hurricane Irene, many people who had not previously had cause to think about the question are probably now discovering that their homeowners' insurance does not cover flood damage. My own homeowner's policy is fairly typical. It excludes flood coverage with a boldface capital "NOT" followed by the definition of a flood (taken from the National Flood Insurance Program): "A general and temporary condition of partial or complete inundation of normally dry land areas from overflow of inland or tidal waters or from the unusual and rapid accumulation of surface waters from any source."

That's clear enough and for someone like me, it's pretty safely ignored. After all, I live near the top of a 1200 foot hill, with no bodies of water on higher ground. But language like that is also undoubtedly ignored by thousands of people who, in retrospect, needed flood insurance. Why do homeowner's policies generally exclude flood coverage?

Insurance companies earn fair returns by collecting premiums and paying out for the realization of uncorrelated risks. An insurance company can calculate the likelihood of a lawsuit alleging a slip-and-fall in a typical home and spread the expected payout over the premiums for all similarly situated homes. The more policies the insurance company writes, the more precisely it can match premiums to payouts.

But a flood is a catastrophic event that is correlated among homeowners, meaning that insurance companies often won't have adequate reserves in case of a truly large flood. That's where the federal program comes in. The federal government makes flood insurance available to communities that adopt measures to minimize flood damage. Yet, as this Wall Street Journal article notes, the federal program is under-funded and at risk of being cancelled. The article suggests that if it is cancelled, private insurers will not be able to make money writing flood insurance policies but will be required by state regulators to write them anyway.

That's a puzzle, isn't it? Obviously, insurers will be able to make money if they are permitted to charge premiums that are actuarially sufficient to cover losses. Perhaps the real problem is that the market rate for flood insurance would make it unaffordable for the people who most badly need it. Still, why would state regulators require insurers to write flood insurance policies at below break-even rates? Such a requirement in effect acts as a transfer from people who don't need or want flood insurance to those who do--because an insurer forced to write flood insurance for below break-even rates must subsidize the flood losses from its other insurance lines (including homeowner's insurance without flood coverage) if it is to stay in business. In this regard, state regulation requiring such private insurance would be quite similar to the current federal guarantee, which is a subsidy from taxpayers.

But this simply raises the further question of why people who don't need flood insurance (e.g., "hill people" like myself) should be made to subsidize people who do need it, whether through taxes or through artificially high premiums on other policies. If someone chooses to build an expensive house (or even a modest one) in an area susceptible to floods, but cannot afford to pay the full market premium, why should the rest of us bail him out (almost literally!) after a flood occurs?

There are, of course, circumstances in which either private insurance or public insurance appropriately pays for coverage of harms that could have been avoided through greater prudence. For example, hospitals don't (or at least shouldn't) turn away uninsured or under-insured victims of their own negligence; health insurance covers the cost of treating diseases caused by risky behavior like cigarette smoking; etc. But in these instances we make a collective judgment (with which I wholeheartedly agree) that it would be terribly inhumane to fight moral hazard by letting people die.

To my mind, no such similar principle applies in the flood context. Someone who has lost his home or business because he chose to locate it in a place where he couldn't afford actual-market-price flood insurance has suffered a real loss, but it does not strike me as terribly inhumane to make him bear that loss himself. Why does the law, at least for now, conclude otherwise?

Loss aversion may provide a psychological explanation. To lose one's home (and to a lesser extent, one's business) is experienced as more traumatic than not to obtain a home (or business). Flood insurance thus functions to combat loss aversion--the basic human tendency to treat losses as worse than foregone gains. That's not a policy justification, though, just a hypothesis about causation. We might do better to try to reconceptualize flood losses in a way that requires people to bear the true cost of their risky location decisions. We could and should still make a judgment to provide collectively subsidized aid to assist people rendered homeless by their own risk-taking location decisions, just not the sort of aid that permits them to repeat the exercise.

Finally, I realize that a great many of the people now suffering from flood damage did not make especially risky decisions. But for them, at least, actuarially sound flood insurance ought to be affordable even without a public subsidy. At most, the government might be needed to act as a reinsurer to pool very large risks.

12 comments:

In principle, I think there is a decent argument for social insurance for flooding. Though some people may indeed choose among many possible places to to build their homes, most of us have the place we live more or less dictated to us by the community we are born into and our economic circumstances. Because (more out of historical accident and public policy decisions than individual choice) a great deal of available housing is in potential flood plains, many people have no real way to avoid the risk of flooding.

The problem with flood insurance seems to be less that it isn't fair for the "hill people" to subsidize the "river people" (after all, the river people subsidize the hill people's expensive roads and power lines!) and more that the moral hazard created by social flood insurance tends to encourage inefficient (and potentially dangerous) housing policy.

The optimal solution would seem to be some form of long-term phase out, grandfathering existing housing while being considerably less generous to new developments (or simply not subsidizing them at all).

First, the analogy with smoking and health insurance is a poor one - typically premiums are higher. And no insurance covers the uninsured (by definition) though we have told some organizations (hospitals) that they must provide emergency services regardless of credit risk.

There is a role for public support after a flood - emergency shelter and so forth. Local communities in flood-prone areas could reduce the cost of flood insurance by improving flood protections (which is what the federal program aims to do). There is also an argument for making flood insurance mandatory with all policies though letting insurance companies charge whatever rates they want - reinsurance and catastrophe bonds could provide the means for insurance companies to price the risk of the macro events.

A policy requiring flood insurance would lessen the community-wide impacts of floods financially and would cost those "on hills" very little and there is no such thing as a place where there is no risk of a flood (well, maybe the moon).

AF - Where we live is not designed by "historical accident" it is designed by economic incentives and non-economic incentives leading to individual choices about where to live. There are some towns that have grown immensely and some that have not. The whole article is talking about economic incentives to economic circumstances are extremely relevant. To say someone can't move to the next town inland during their lifetime is far overstated.

There is no need for a phase-out, just change the federal flood insurance program to a program to coordinate and verify local flood reduction programs that insurance companies can rely on - that eliminates the information and collective action problems that competing insurance companies would face and yet doesn't put the taxpayers on the hook for losses (other than bailing out failed insurance companies where policies are guaranteed by law).

英文seo But for many scholars who are considering law process, moving to another law university may not help at all, even given the fact that more legal companies may sponsor there. Why? Because, as I reviewed above, a top student at a mid-ranked law university found herself in the center of the training at a higher-ranked university. Without law assessment experience, she may fight recognize herself from other regular people at her new university. Had she you will find at her unique organization, however, she would likely have placed very high in the training, with a law assessment panel position and recommendations from top instructors to improve her programs. WOW Gold

Professor Hockett, in a private email, has graciously taken on the blame for the "global currency" confusion that I note at the end of this post. In a very long-run sense, the Hockett vision could become a system with cambridge bag a well-regulated global currency. That, however, is definitely not what is needed in the immediate, or even in the intermediate, policy environment. The confusion in Nocera's column, however, could have been the result of a shortened the cambridge satchel explanation that Professor Hockett provided to him.

Many individuals whether they fall victim to a flood or not, wonder exactly what a flood insurance plan is. In the past, when an individual or community suffered flood damage the government offered assistance through disaster relief. Disaster relief was and still is important, but it did not solve the problem of flooding. Flood Insurance Houston can help you in insuring your property for flood measures.

Must say that overall I am really impressed with this blog. It is easy to see that you are passionate about your writing. If only I had your writing ability I look forward to more updates and will be returning.italianfoodquiz.org |

I am just writing to let you understand what a great encounter our girl obtained visiting yuor web blog. She mastered numerous pieces, with the inclusion of what it is like to possess an ideal giving spirit to get the mediocre ones without difficulty master specific complicated things. You undoubtedly did more than people’s expectations. Thank you for presenting these warm and helpful, trusted, revealing and even unique guidance on the topic to Evelyn.atltophomes.com |